From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky Mon May 25 14:05:14 EDT 1992
Article 5634 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: AI and morality
Message-ID: <1992May13.235259.17200@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1992May12.091534.22317@norton.com> <1992May13.160622.13958@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1992May13.174643.17539@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1992 23:52:59 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <1992May13.174643.17539@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>In article <1992May13.160622.13958@mp.cs.niu.edu> 
>rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>>
>>  The RIGHT place to start thing about morality is in some newsgroup
>>OTHER THAN comp.ai.philosophy.
>>
>  I disagree.  The fundamental problem of philosophy is "What
>should I do now?".  It applies to AI in numerous ways.  One
>is, "Assuming that we *can* build AIs, should we?"; another,
>if the answer is yes, is, "What kind should we build?".
>
>  More technically, it is important to think about what
>morality is, in order to be able to build it into the
>AIs that we (eventually) create.
>
>	-- Bill

In fact, the point (I think) of my last post was to say what I think
morality is -- that is, what any particular morality is -- namely, a
sort of "animal" that has evolved as a meme-system over the substrate
of a human social system.

The reason this is not generally recognized, I think, is that we're
used to trying to justify our particular moral-schemes on various
sorts of "absolute" or "a priori" grounds. These reflect the fact that
our moral philosophy evolved before the last century of psychology and
of evolutionary theories.  So the very idea of "meme" did not ssem to
have any standard name before Dawkins.  Then because of this
insistence on absolutes, we have these bizarre conversations in which
some members of this group find "vegetarian pro-abortionist" to be
'obviously wrong' and others can't figure where that person is coming
from.
 
Marvin Minsky
--------------------


